As is often pointed out, Thomas More’s 1516 coining of the word “utopia” comes from the combination of the Greek “ou” (not) and “topos” (a place): in other words, “nowhere”. The poststructuralist Marxist’s response: “nowhere” is also “now here”, and present at least in possibility. I’m not so sure.
Neoclassical economists want to “prove that, given similar conditions, consumers and producers who maximise utility or profit in a free market environment unconsciously engender a social reality which is the best society could hope for (given its resources and private preferences)” (206). However, in order to do this, “the public interest (or common good, or general will) must be defined — otherwise there is no way of showing that it is served (or maximised) by one rather than another socio-economic system” (206). But doesn’t very definition of a common good directly contravene the neoclassical claim to apolitical disinterestedness? Doesn’t this demand that the neoclassical economist take an explicitly political stance, saying “We privilege X over Y as the common good”? Doesn’t the notion of a common good — a just society — demand the interpersonal comparisons of utility that neoclassical economists declare themselves adamantly unwilling to make?
The poststructuralist and social-constructionist notions that our subjectivities are relationally and discursively formed and shaped by our social environments here seem to come into direct conflict with the essentialist individualism of neoclassical economics: while social conservatives cry that poststructuralist and social constructionist thought pave the road toward a dangerous supreme moral relativism, it seems more reasonable to suggest that such notions actually demand a rigorous communal ethics and interpersonal understanding of morality. (Well, perhaps not entirely: I think I might see how radical libertarians could put poststructuralist thought to some genuinely scary uses, were they to ever get past their dipstick me-me-me pre-awakening-Once-ler essentialist cries of sovereign individual entitlement.) If we are to live together, morality (I’m talking general rather than religious here) requires interpersonal comparisons of utility, while also taking a certain individualist essentialism or fundamentalism (the notion that there are some rights which are simply inalienable no matter what) at its core. (I think John Rawls might help me some with these ideas.) Ultimately and necessarily, the neoclassical privileging of an individualist and apolitical efficiency is amoral.
Consider: according to Varoufakis, Vilfredo Pareto suggested that “A distribution of commodities or resources is efficient provided there is no possibility of altering it and in doing so make (sic) someone better off without making somebody else worse off” (207). The definition can also be stated negatively: “a distribution of resources or commodities is, again, inefficient if an alteration of it could potentially make some member of society better off without making somebody else worse off” (207). “Efficiency” here refers to the way in which one mixes, allocates, or distributes resources, rather than to how hard a firm can squeeze its workers — the latter being more properly termed “productivity” by neoclassicists and “rate of exploitation” by Marxists. For example, let’s imagine a blend of labor and capital (i.e., machines) required to produce 100 widgets. Say a unit of labor costs $5, and a unit of capital costs $15. A firm finds that it can produce 100 widgets using a combination of 6 units of labor and 4 units of capital, for a total cost of $90. Now: if the firm finds that it can produce more than 100 widgets by allocating its resources differently, but at the same cost — say, by using a combination of more labor and less capital, such as 2 units of capital and 12 units of labor, again for a total cost of $90 — then the first blend of resources was inefficient. However, if all combinations of resources totaling $90, other than the first combination of 6 units of labor and 4 units of capital, produce less than 100 widgets, then that first combination was efficient.
In my past writings, I’ve been recognizing some of the same problems with this privileged definition of Pareto efficiency that Varoufakis sees: “Consider a distribution in which one person owns everything on earth whereas everybody else is wretched, starving, and hopeless. Given the economic definition of efficiency, this is an efficient distribution of resources (since moving away from it would make one person — the Gargantuan owner of the whole world — worse off)” (221). Indeed. Despite the 1998 publication date of Foundations of Economics, Varoufakis seems to understand quite well the logic behind George W. Bush’s No Millionaire Left Behind tax plan.
Now: in the context of the wired writing classroom, how does neoclassical economics perceive the various blends of resources? In the interests of efficiency, whose labor does capital (i.e., computers) reduce? Students’? Instructors’? And whose labor is the university most interested in reducing, especially if we understand all learning as a necessarily labor-intensive process?
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